Best Price Case in Point: Complete Case Interview Preparation (10th Anniversary Edition) Review

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Case in Point: Complete Case Interview Preparation (10th Anniversary Edition) Review

Case in Point is a must read for people who are serious about getting a consulting job.
Having said that, this book will not help you get a consulting job unless:
(a) You are already interested in business; and
(b) Have good common sense; and
(c) Are comfortable with quantitative questioning; and
(d) Have good interviewing skills; and
(e) have an impressive enough CV to get an interview.
The above does not apply if you are one of those exceptional people who will probably receive offers everywhere you go (in which case the book may still be useful nonetheless).
After reading this book I interviewed with both Bain and McKinsey (for AC and BA positions) as well as with a number of investment banks. Ultimately I received a couple of offers at investment banks, was knocked out in the second round at Bain and received an offer from McKinsey.
Surprisingly the concepts I learnt in the book helped me with my IB interviews (at places such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley) as once they establish the basics (ie you can do DCF and understand undergraduate finance 101) they quickly move to strategy-type questioning where people familiar with consulting frameworks have a massive advantage.
Advantages of the Book
The advantage of this book is that it gives you a number of frameworks which can be adapted to answer pure strategy questions. I am aware of no other books that give you such detailed frameworks. The book then gives you a large number of practice questions (most of them are `allegedly' based on real interviews), shows the implementation of those frameworks in candidate answers and then critiques those answers.
To give you an example of how the book worked well for me - take my Bain interview Rnd 1 - the question was Toys R Us is thinking of putting in Vet surgeries in its stores - is it a good idea or not? What should they be thinking about? I was able to draw on the Case in Point problem of a retail store looking at putting a banking outlet in its store to guide my answer. If you immediately know that the things you should be looking at are entering a new market frameworks as well as synergy analysis and the potential for cannibalisation of store space you can arrive at an answer quickly that makes you look more insightful than the average.
In one of my McK round 1 interviews I was actually told that I had hit every single point on the answer guide. Not bad considering that I hadn't thought of anything original.
Disadvantages
One disadvantage of this book are that you can become so proficient with the frameworks that you can start using a framework that the interviewer wasn't wanting. Perhaps this was my overconfidence!
To give you an example in Bain Rnd 2 I was asked about a private equity company that had bought a company and wanted to "grow the business". I immediately started using a "grow the business" framework - ie revenue enhancement model, when it actually turned out that the interviewer wanted a cut cost to boost profitability model that focussed on holding period and exit strategy.
Another disadvantage is that you never are allowed enough time to write down your proposed framework to the answer before you are required to start answering the case so you better have it all worked out in your head. A follow on problem of this is that your answer can seem "creative but unstructured". I personally found that Bain obsessed about structure but McK cared more about creativity.
Some of the frameworks also need improving as they are too esoteric (especially at an entry level). The profit equation for example that Cosentino uses in the 5th edition is (I believe) so esoteric that if I had written it down I would have been laughed at. The one he advocates in the 4th edition is superior.
The pricing section is very insightful (and interesting) but did not help me much with questions about corporate valuation (ie "we have an exploding offer in 20 minutes and need to decide whether we sell the factory for $5 million or not") where I had to fall back on what I had learned about accounting and finance in my undergraduate degree. This question arose in both Bain and McKinsey cases.
Another thing that puzzled me is whether this book is targeted at MBA level entrants or undergraduates.
Conclusion
Overall the book is excellent and if married with the online questions (which you have to buy separately) can enhance case-interviewing immeasurably. I know friends of mine who I would consider smarter than me that bombed out spectacularly because they hadn't prepared.
If you want to prepare then this is the gold standard. Successful preparation with this book will take at least 20+ hours.
It won't however get you a job unless you bring the qualities to the table that the firms are after - eg leadership, presence, good grades and business acumen.

Case in Point: Complete Case Interview Preparation (10th Anniversary Edition) Overview

Cosentino demystifies the consulting case interview. He takes you inside a typical interview by exploring the various types of case questions and he shares with you a system that will help you answer today's most sophisticated case questions. This new edition includes new case material plus 10 Partner cases to make it easy to give cases to your classmates.

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44% Off Discounts: Buy Cheap Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Review

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Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Review

This book is very different as a business book. Instead of being filled with dense, usually overly wordy pages, it is beautifully laid out, the wording is kept to a minimum, and there are lots of illustrations.
The book is focused on ways to think of the model for your business... with some nice guidelines for structuring the thought process... as well as a bunch of examinations of different types of businesses.
It has good discussions on thinking through what is critical for the business, where the cost structures are, where the benefits are, and how to organize and present those ideas.
It also has a number of cases studies of various companies that changed or invented new business models, such as Amazon's introduction of Web Services.
The book is fast to read, and there were several sections I bookmarked to put into use in my company, which to me is always a good sign for a book.
Where the book is lacking is that I would really have liked more case studies -- a bit more meat so to speak -- once a company came up with the new model, how did the artifacts of the book's discussions come into play with the execution? Did any of the techniques discussed help with the inevitable pitfalls associated? What are some case studies for when people tried the techniques discussed and failed miserably? Innovator's Dilemma, by comparison, does a much better look at both positive and negative case studies, which can provide a lot more learning.
I also would have liked more depth on the blue ocean discussion.
Altogether though, an interesting read and a good addition to my management book shelf.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Overview

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34% Off Discounts: Best Price Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Review

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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Review

Before plunking down your credit card for a copy of Drive, by Dan Pink, consider making do with just his TED talk. The talk contains the substance of this book without the excess padding.
The book has about 250 pages. One hundred fifty or so of those are for the basic content. It includes the Introduction and Parts I and II (chapters one through six).
The other hundred pages are a "Toolkit." This includes some material that didn't seem to fit anywhere else, a glossary, a recap of Drive, twenty conversation starters (useful at cocktail parties), a reading list, and a fitness plan. That's forty percent of the book. And none of it helps you put what you've read to work.
The core points of the book are covered in the TED talk. You can listen to it in about fifteen minutes or read it in about ten. You won't get the fitness plan or the conversation starters. You will get the essence of Pink's message.
If you're a boss or concerned about leadership, you need to become familiar with that message. The ideas are important. Pink's rendering of them, for good or ill, will define and influence the discussion of motivation in business for quite a while.
He does get the big picture right. He says that people would prefer activities where they can pursue three things.
Autonomy: People want to have control over their work.
Mastery: People want to get better at what they do.
Purpose: People want to be part of something that is bigger than they are.
This matches research that I've done with class members for over twenty-five years. They discuss a time when "it was great to come to work" and then create a description of what those times are like. The descriptions vary slightly in wording but always include the following.
Productivity.
Community.
Interesting and meaningful work.
Clear and reasonable expectations.
Frequent and usable feedback.
Consistency.
Fairness.
Maximum control possible over work life.
I'm describing the kinds of workplaces where intrinsic motivation happens. Pink is describing three things that provide that kind of motivation. In most highly effective workplaces, it's the boss that is the most important force creating an environment when intrinsic motivation can happen.
Top management sets the basic compensation and benefits structure. If that isn't perceived as fair and consistent, natural intrinsic motivation won't kick in.
It's your individual supervisor who has the biggest effect on your daily working environment. That's why there are pockets of excellence in otherwise horrid companies and why even the best companies have workers who are unhappy and teams that are unproductive.
This book won't give you the connection from concept to workplace. But Pink does deliver many key ideas that matter.
Key Idea: There is a difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Key Idea: Intrinsic motivators are more powerful.
Key Idea: If you use monetary rewards to get people to perform the way you want, those rewards may have the opposite effect.
These are important things for a boss to know, but if you only have Drive to guide you, you will get some things very wrong.
The examples that are used are heavily weighted toward academic and consulting studies. It's not apparent that Pink talked to a single worker or frontline supervisor. The book would have been more helpful if he had.
There are some pre-requisites to having intrinsic motivation kick in. Pink mentions in passing that there needs to be fair compensation in place. That's true, but it's not an "oh-by-the-way" point. It's Maslow's Hierarchy in work clothes.
Throughout the book, Pink equates "monetary" incentives with "extrinsic motivation." That ignores praise, promotion, preferment (in scheduling, eg), the admiration of peers, time off, and a host of other positive incentives. It also skews the discussion toward academic studies and away from the real workplace.
Pink also presents the issue as if it were intrinsic motivators (good) versus extrinsic motivators (not good). In the TED talk he even says "This is the titanic battle between these two approaches."
That's not how things work in the real world. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and their effects interact. You don't have a simple choice of which lever to pull. You have to understand and influence a complex system.
Those shortcomings are important. They derive from one of the most important things to understand if you've going to study this material critically and turn it to good use.
Pink has written this book like a political speech. He writes to make a point, not to present a balanced argument.
Like a good speech writer, Pink uses language that implies value judgments. He uses terms like "humanistic psychology" for things he agrees with. When he doesn't agree he uses terms like "rat-like seeking."
Like a good speech writer, Pink makes sweeping statements without providing support for them. "Sometimes" and "a surprisingly large proportion of the time" are used with no indication of what they actually mean. He says that sales quotas "can be effective," but doesn't tell you when or how often.
Like a good speech writer, Pink leaves out things that don't support his simplified message. There's no mention of studies that support the use of rewards in business settings.
Like a good speech writer, Pink boils his facts down to only the ones that support his argument. If all you read was Drive, you would think that the work of Deci and Ryan is about the superiority of intrinsic motivators to extrinsic in all situations.
But their work is more complex than Pink describes it. It includes analysis of effective extrinsic motivators as well as extrinsic motivators that are counter-productive.
Like a good speech writer, pink, picks up studies from one sphere and applies them elsewhere without telling you what he's doing. Deci and Ryan have done admirable and important work, but it's on motivation in personal development, not in the workplace.
Like a good speech writer, Pink ignores contradictions. He describes a horrid, slave ship workplace ruled by carrots and sticks. Later he mentions that most "flow" experiences happen at work.
Pink tells us about "20 percent" time for creativity at Google and Atlassian. But he doesn't discuss why they only offer their intrinsic reward of creativity to engineers and not the other workers in the company.
Like a good speech writer, Pink sets up the straw man of "Motivation 2.0" so that he's easy to knock down. And, inconvenient truths are sometimes mentioned in passing and then never heard from again.
The Bottom Line
You should learn what's in this book because, for better or worse, it is influencing the conversation about what makes a great workplace. But because of the presentation and selective use of facts, you can't rely on this book alone to help you do a better job as a boss.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Overview

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